16 February 2018

BITS Pilani Students’ team “Umang” comprising of Paresh Deshmukh, Neil Sarkar, Shaily Bhatt and Siddhant Dwivedi has won the Case Study Challenge 2018 in the prestigious Indian Road Safety Campaign bagging a cash prize of Rs. 25,000 and goodies.

Indian Road Safety Campaign in collaboration with the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, Government of India and Technex, IIT BHU Varanasi organized the mega event. The Case Study Challenge Finale 2017-2018, is a quintessential platform for all specialists that offers competitive Case Study problems related to Pot Holes - Apathy towards Roads and chance of a discussion session with Shri Swatantra Dev Singh, Transport Minister, Ministry of Transport and Protocol, Government of Uttar Pradesh. The competition had two rounds. In the preliminary round, the participants had to submit a presentation of their solutions while in the final round that was held in IIT BHU on 10th of Feb 2018, the selected participants were required to present their solutions. The final round as a well-organized event was graced by Road and Transport Minister of Uttar Pradesh and many other officials.

15 February 2018

GnomikX, a healthcare startup created by fourth-year students from BITS Pilani, was selected winner of the 2018 edition of Empersario, which is an internationally popular business model competition that is held annually by IIT Kharagpur. Empersario is one of the most popular competitions of its kind and attracts young startups from all over the country - the number of participants this year going over 1500. The finale of the competition took place at Ambuja Neotia, Kolkata on 4th February 2018, and saw the participation of about 15 finalist teams. GnomikX, on being selected as the winners, were awarded a prize of INR 2 lakhs.

Surbhit Johri, a dual-degree student in Biology and Electrical Engineering who is one of the founders of GnomikX, presented their business model to a jury of investors and venture capitalists. He is also a Khorana scholar who was awarded a summer internship at MIT, USA. Ever since GnomikX was founded, their team has constantly worked in close coordination with the Department of Biological Sciences, BITS Pilani and research labs in MIT. Other co-founders are Raja Shukla and Aditya Chauhan, both of whom are dual-degree students in BITS Pilani, and Dr. Attya Omer, a scientist at MIT, USA. Besides winning Empersario and attracting significant amounts of funding from investors, GnomikX is also amongst the very few startups that have made it to the Nexus incubation programme, which is an ongoing collaboration between the U.S. Embassy and IC2 Institute of Technology, Texas to encourage and aid promising startups in India.

GnomikX offers saliva-based genetic testing for prevention and management of lifestyle disorders such as diabetes, hypertension, and obesity. Over past few decades, India has come to be seriously ailed with these lifestyle disorders, and it has been shown that most lifestyle disorders are hereditary and caused due to the genetic makeup of an individual. This means that if they can be detected at an early stage, they can be prevented or at least delayed by small changes in lifestyle. This is where GnomikX comes into the picture as they aim to provide personalized prevention and management plans based on our analysis of genomic information of an individual.

14 February 2018

Joy Mukherjee, a third-year dual degree student in Physics and Computer Science at BITS Pilani, Pilani campus who is a member of satellite team, which is currently building a Nanosatellite with support from ISRO is selected as the winner of Hackathon Easy Ride - Bonjour India on the theme of smart and sustainable mobility, a flagship programme by the French Embassy, in collaboration with Indian and French transportation industries. The program was graced by H.E Mr. Alexandre Ziegler, Ambassador of France to India, along with the Lieutenant Governor of Pondicherry, Ms. Kiran Bedi and Chief Secretary Mr. Ashwani Kumar. The competition took place in Veltech University, Chennai on January, 2018 and saw the participation of about 40 selected student teams from all over the country. Ten Jury Members coming from leading industrial companies such as Faurecia, Simpson & Co. Ltd, WABCO India Ltd., Mahindra World City, Mahindra Electric Mobility Ltd., Nissan Ashok Leyland Power Train Ltd., Renault and Ausländer International evaluated the projects and awarded the three most innovative projects for each stream of competition.

Joy Mukherjee is awarded the first prize with incubation support and a prize money of Rs. 30,000 for his work on smart and connected urban transportation systems. He has also won the Best Paper award in Spacecraft Systems and Mechanisms Division, at the “National Conference On Small Satellites Technology and Applications (NCSSTA 2017).” The conference took place in Chennai during December 2017 to address the miniaturization technologies, small satellites missions and involvement of different sectors towards accessibility of space. There were invited talks and papers in the conference and awards and publication prospects were accorded to best papers in each category during the event.

BITS Pilani Team Wins First Prize at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India Hackathon

14 Feb 2018

BITS Pilani

BITS Pilani Team Wins First Prize at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India Hackathon

BITS Pilani Team Wins First Prize at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India Hackathon

14 February 2018

More than 50 programming and car enthusiastic ‘hackers’ participated at the Daimler Hackathon in Bangalore and developed digital prototypes associated with Daimler’s strategic focus CASE. CASE stands for connected, autonomous, shared & service and electric drive. In total, more than 350 teams from India applied for the Hackathon. The top 11 teams had been invited including students from India’s leading engineering and IT universities. In close cooperation with Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India (MBRDI) they created convincing solutions within just 24 hours. The Hackathon in Bangalore took place on 19th and 20th January 2018 and is the last event of the current Hackathon series by Daimler’s Digital Life Campus.

The first winners, team ‘V1’ from BITS Pilani, the Students comprising the team: Aadi Jain, Anmol Singhal, Saurabh Manish Raje, Nischay Singh developed a prototype that helps vehicles to detect pedestrians with infrared light. The team ‘V1’ now has the possibility to present their idea to increase road safety at the Mobile World Congress 2018 in Barcelona. Furthermore, this winning team was rewarded with a cash prize of Rs 150,000. Other teams included students from IIT Kharagpur, Delhi Technical University, VIT, Vellore and PES, Banglore to name a few.

Since 2016 Daimler organizes its Hackathon series called Digital Life Campus. In total, ten events with more than 500 participants on three continents took place working on ideas in the field of digitalization. The events are organized by the team DigitalLife@Daimler that promotes and realizes projects concerning the digital transformation across the company.